A protest outside the theater accompanied the world premiere of Bad Apples at TIFF 2025. I wandered through it before taking my seat, donning a Free Palestine pin I’d picked up on my way in. It felt performative in that moment, a show of solidarity while I sat at ease in the theater, my privilege allowing me to be here. 

Then the lights dimmed, the noise faded, and Jonatan Etzler’s debut feature began. That tension—between the chaos of the real world and the insulated ritual of cinema—lingered throughout the screening, and with me still.

The Saoirse Ronan-led film follows Maria, a primary school teacher who struggles to manage her class due to one unruly student, Danny. 

Any movie that features child actors is a risk, but it pays off in Bad Apples’ case with a remarkable performance by Eddie Walker as Danny (and equally impressive Nia Brown as Pauline). Walker provides depth to Danny, making it clear this is not just childish disruption–but something more. It’s easy to see how his behavior could snowball. His bursts of violence, particularly against another student, simmer with unprocessed rage. 

Maria’s failure to contain Danny leads to mounting pressure from the school staff and the parents of other students. When she asks for help from the administration, she is dismissed as it’s not feasible, showcasing the strains in the education system. 

However, a solution to her problem comes in an unexpected way. The film’s shocking turn arrives when, after an accidental injury and a threat from Danny to expose her, Maria makes a decision that will change the course of both their lives–locking the boy in her basement. 

What unfolds is a grimly satirical inversion of the inspirational-teacher genre. With Danny “gone,” Maria’s classroom blossoms. She wins praise from parents and administrators alike, finally receiving the validation she craved. 

In the cellar, she continues to teach Danny, discovering the reason behind his outbursts stems from his lack of education and, once again, a display of the faults within our education system. 

Their relationship evolves in unsettling ways—oddly tender, even wholesome. She brings him games, upgrades his living space, and, in some sense, gives him the support he’s never had. For a time, it almost feels like they’ve created a strange, fragile family unit. 

You think, for a moment, what if they just keep doing this? 

Maria becomes more vibrant as the film progresses—her clothing lightens, her makeup brightens, until in the final act she dons a bold red lip. Her students thrive, her confidence blooms, and even her ex seems to notice her renewed energy. Yet the audience can’t shake the fact that this “transformation” rests on a horrifying crime. 

Etzler leans into this discomfort while Ronan plays the contradiction masterfully. She waves between the two vastly different worlds Maria occupies. 

The film’s tension escalates when another student—a model pupil with a fixation on Maria, and one of Danny’s earlier victims—discovers the secret and uses it to her advantage. Here, Ronan truly shines, capturing Maria’s unraveling as her precarious new life begins to collapse. Watching her, it feels as though she, too, is imprisoned in the basement with Danny, trapped in a cycle of moral compromises.

When the truth finally surfaces, the resolution lands with a gut punch. Etzler doesn’t offer easy answers; instead, he forces us to sit with the implications. 

For me, the most powerful element of Bad Apples lies in its satire. Beneath the disturbing plot beats, the film interrogates our willingness to ignore individual suffering for the sake of our own selfish gains. The students are doing better now that Danny is gone. The school receives wide-scale praise. Life is good for everyone to simply do what they have already done for so long–ignore Danny.

Its allegorical weight is hard to miss: whose pain are we willing to overlook so that the rest of us may feel comfortable? In my case, the parallel to the protest outside the theater was inescapable. 

That sense of unease became amplified for me during the Q&A, where an audience member joked about enjoying a child being hurt on screen. I sat seething and spiraling, wondering how many had truly absorbed what Etzler was putting before us. Was the film’s discomfort misread as edginess? Was its satire mistaken for mockery?

Perhaps it is a much bigger testament to our society that the audience was not willing to interrogate themselves. Bad Apples was no longer the story on the screen, but the audience around me.

For all its bleakness, Bad Apples is an intelligent, unsettling debut. It holds up a mirror to privilege and complicity, asking us to recognize our own blind spots and hypocrisies. It makes us laugh, then makes us recoil for having laughed. By its end, I was left unsettled not only by Maria’s choices, but by my own reactions—the ways I was complicit in enjoying the story, the ways I, too, looked away.

Bad Apples is not an easy film to watch, nor is it meant to be. It challenges us to embrace discomfort, to sit with our guilt, to feel the weight of it. And then take action. It forces viewers to confront privilege, complicity, and the discomfort of looking away.

Etzler and Ronan have delivered something bracing and necessary: a work that treats us with more intelligence than we may deserve.

Review Courtesy of Kam Ryan

Feature Image Courtesy of TIFF